A yellow and black sculpture in Pomona’s Lyon Garden stands as a silent testimony that artist Chris Burden ’69, who died of cancer at his home in May, started his artistic life as he finished it—as an amazing sculptor. Originally a part of Burden’s senior show, the work was recreated for the 2011-12 exhibition, “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973.” Burden once said this piece “held the kernel for much of his subsequent work,” says Pomona College Museum of Art Director Kathleen Howe.
In the decade after his graduation from Pomona, Burden was most famous (or maybe infamous) for a series of controversial—and often dangerous—performance art pieces that tested the limits of his courage and endurance. For “Shoot” (1971), an assistant shot Burden in the arm with a rifle while a Super-8 camera recorded the event on grainy film; and in “Trans-fixed” (1974), Burden was nailed face-up to a Volkswagen Beetle in a crucifixion pose. For his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine, he locked himself for five days inside an ordinary school locker. Other performance pieces found him shooting at a jet passing overhead, crawling through glass and lying down in heavy traffic on a crowded street.
As Kristine McKenna noted in a Los Angeles Times memorial, “Burden operated like a guerrilla artist, staging his pieces with little advance word. Many of the early performances took place in his studio, documented only by his friends. As artworks, they were experienced largely as rumor—and Burden did manipulate rumor as a creative material. When you heard about a Chris Burden performance, an image would streak through your mind like a blazing comet. That was part of the point.”
In 1979, “The Big Wheel”—in which an eight-foot flywheel made from three tons of cast iron was powered up by a revving motorcycle, then allowed to spin in silence for several hours—marked a dramatic shift in Burden’s artistic approach, combining performance with the kind of witty, inventive and monumental sculptural creation for which he would later become best known. Today, “The Big Wheel” remains in the collection of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
“The Big Wheel” was followed by other monumental works, almost always involving some jaw-dropping surprise, such as “The Flying Steamroller” (1996), in which a counterbalanced steamroller did exactly what the title suggests, and “What My Dad Gave Me” (2008), a 65-foot skyscraper made entirely of parts from Erector sets.
Perhaps his most iconic work is the ongoing “Urban Light,” an array of restored, antique cast-iron street lamps at the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The Los Angeles Times notes that it “rapidly became something of an L.A. symbol.” LACMA director Michael Govan told the Times that Burden “wanted to put the miracle back in the Miracle Mile” and said his work “combines the raw truth of our reality and an optimism of what humans can make and do.”
Back at Pomona, where it all started, that yellow and black sculpture now looks fairly tame. And yet, Howe notes, “In this early work you can see the interplay of his engagement with sculpture and aspects of performance. It is a remarkably assured piece from a young artist who was working through the issues that would engage him for the rest of his career.”
Pomona College Museum of Art senior curator Rebecca McGrew worked closely with Burden on the “It Happened at Pomona” exhibition, spending many hours with him in his studio. “Meeting Chris Burden and getting to know him is one of the biggest honors of my career,” McGrew says. “In addition to being brilliant, warm and amazingly easy to work with, Chris is one of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries because his visionary and internationally renowned artwork challenges viewers’ beliefs about art and the contemporary world. I am so sorry to not be able to work with him again.”